Catherine Telford-Keogh
Dental Dam
Gallery Two
Exhibition Info
Catherine Telford-Keogh combines domestic, industrial, and edible materials in unfamiliar ways to highlight inherent connections between human and non-human matter. Adopting the forms of tables, trays, containers, and other familiar functional objects, her sculptures act as flatbed terrains for the accumulation of aqueous and encrusted materials mixed beyond easy recognition. Dental Dam presents an installation of new objects configured to consider the excess and blockage of the mouth; a porous site of communication, sexuality, and ingestion. The artist overlays, coats, and embeds a gamut of objects and liquids that shift and chemically alter over time to simulate aspects of digestion. Her intense layering of elements combine to form chains of superimposed ingredients—including brand names such as Yankee Candlez® Fragrance Spheresâ„¢, Froot Loops®, and Purina® Dog Chow®. The use of prolonged titles and lists of materials makes explicit the base materiality of these elements and their relationship to capitalist material culture. Telford-Keogh’s work suggests a discomfiting intimacy between bodies and things consumed, evoking underlying links between ecology, consumption, and bodily function.
The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Photography: Laura Findlay
Artist Biography
Catherine Telford-Keogh works in sculpture and video. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Bronx Museum, NYC; Vox Populi, Pennsylvania; Greenpoint Film Festival, Brooklyn, NYC; and has mounted solo exhibitions at Roberta Palen, Toronto; and Evans Contemporary, Peterborough. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art and an MA in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University; and completed her BA in Fine Arts with a minor in Women’s Studies at the University of Waterloo. She lives and works in Toronto.